Wednesday, September 10, 2014

ISIS son of surge

ISIS, son of surge

In today’s New Yorker, one of the several liberal hawks in
the stable, George Packer, dons his favorite style – more in sorrow than in
anger, burdened by the tragic task of bringing civ to the uncivilized, etc. –
and asks what are the lessons of the fall of Saigon for Obama, facing ISIS. The
short answer is that Packer gets an F – he seemingly is incapable of learning a
lesson that goes against his burning desire to benefit all humanity by way of the
Pentagon. Because of course we must, Packer thinks, get into the struggle
against ISIS. And he hopes our president will be clear about what that means: “But he also
needs to tell the country bluntly that there will almost certainly be more
American casualties, and that the struggle againstISIS—against radical Islam generally, but especially in this
case—will be difficult, with no quick military solution and no end in sight.”

Now, another person might think,
hmm, no end in sight, struggle against radical Islam in general, American blood
– well, the lesson of Vietnam is we not engage in anything that pointless. But
not our masterthinker.

Why America is supposed to struggle against radical Islam is
pretty unclear, especially as America – as Packer haughtily overlooks – is allied
to radical Islam and has been for a long time (which is maybe why Packer doesn’t
even talk about Saudi Arabia, much less the UAE). But not to worry, at least
the struggle will be long and without any clear purpose. Sounds like a plan!

The rhetoric of the liberal hawks is the same old same old,
same with the old hawks, but it is starting to penetrate the public and get
them ready for another episode in America’s pointless wars. The terms in this episode, like the last one, will be that those
who oppose the war actually support ISIS, and chopping off heads, etc.

So, here are the futile facts. It is today's hawks who
physically supported ISIS by making sure the Syrian rebels were good and armed,
including arms that came from Libya. And it is by no means apologizing for ISIS
to wonder about the meaning of the fact that ISIS, which at its largest is a
twentieth the size of the Iraqi army, rolled over that army. The Iraqi army,
remember, was armed with billions of dollars worth of US weapons and trained
through other billions of dollars worth of aid. Thirty billion is an often
mentioned figure. And what did they do? Why, they fled, in their hundred
thousands, from ISIS's thousands. And what did the conquered population think?
Well, as far as I can tell, the Sunni majority in the regions ISIS conquered
are definitely glad not to be subject to the Shia militias protected by the Maliki
government or the minions of that government who made a habit of kidnapping, torturing and killing Sunnis in
the old fashioned way.

And why did this situation come about? More generally, of
course, it was the occupation. But more particularly, the Sunni-Shiite split
was ratified and frozen by the surge. You remember the triumphant surge,
trumpeted in the press as our victory in Iraq? It came in two parts. One was
surrender to the Sunni insurgents in their territory, plus bribery of the
tribes. The other was creating physical barriers separating neighborhoods in
urban centers. This accelerated and put an official stamp on the segregation of
Sunni and Shiite, which, before the occupation, was officially verboten. From
that segregation naturally arose a consciousness, among both parties, of
themselves as separate entities. This, of course, has led to the current
situation, which is a combination of ISIS and a good old fashioned Sunni
rebellion. Ba’athist military men, not exactly a mainstay of “radical” Islam,
joined ISIS. They joined because they wanted to fight the power in Baghdad.

So, Packer is proposing that we agree to fight a nebulous
enemy instead of a specific and complex one, in a landscape devoid of any
history except the American one – which consists of Americans heroically
rescuing their Vietnamese pals, or their Iraqi pals, etc.

Here are the questions the war hawks should answer: how can you couple
defeating ISIS and reconciling the Iraqi Sunnis with the Iraqi Shiite state;
how can you fight against Syria while simulataneously asking Syria to fight
against ISIS; how can you defeat an enemy that has morale and skill with a
foreign force from the air; how can you
restrain the landgrabbing of your allies, like Kurdistan; how can you restrain
the resourcing of ISIS by your other allies in the Gulf?

My prediction is that none of these questions will even be
asked, and that an empty and ultimately disasterous moral gesture will take thousands of lives and produce exactly
nothing.

But at least we will have done something! And isn’t that the
sweetest little sop to our narcissism?

About Me

MANY YEARS LATER as he faced the firing squad, Roger Gathman was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover
ice. Or rather, to discover the profit making potential of selling bags of ice to picnicking Atlantans, the most glorious of the old man's Get Rich schemes, the one that devoured the most energy, the one that seemed so rational for a time, the one that, like all the others - the farm, the housebuilding business, the plastic sign business, chimney cleaning, well drilling, candy machine renting - was drawn by an inexorable black hole that opened up between skill and lack of business sense, imagination and macro-economics, to blow a huge hole in the family savings account. But before discovering the ice machine at 12, Roger had discovered many other things - for instance, he had a distinct memory of learning how to tie his shoes. It was in the big colonial, a house in the Syracuse metro area that had been built to sell and that stubbornly wouldn't - hence, the family had moved into it. He remembered bending over the shoes, he remembered that clumsy feeling in his hands - clumsiness, for the first time, had a habitation, it was made up of this obscure machine, the shoe, and it presaged a lifetime of struggle with machine after machine.